"Nextgen" GPUs

Moriendor said:

Those huge tower coolers are a little unwieldy but unfortunately there is nothing out there that would be a reasonable choice for a silent PC lover like myself.

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Whaaaat?
*Pets his cooler*
And you know what is even more silent than a fan? No fan!


This is my second PC though (not a gaming PC, so no graphics card)

What m/b & CPU did you use?

Kordanor said:

Whaaaat?
*Pets his cooler*
And you know what is even more silent than a fan? No fan!

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Liiiiiiieeeeesss!

I can see all the fans... you need to hide them better .

Moriendor said:

What for though? Only about .00001% of games are CPU bound so squeezing the last drop of juice out of your CPU is rather pointless (unless GG needs this for her development stuff, of course).

As for noise, me as a silent freak has done quite extensive research and my findings are that every single all-in-one water cooling solution is more noisy than the top of the line air coolers (the main culprit is usually the pump).

So, unless you really need the very last MHz of CPU power, as a pure gamer, you are way better off with a decent silent air cooler (Noctua, Thermalright come to mind instantly).

That said, I also keep hoping for a killer water cooling set because I would really love to save the space. Those huge tower coolers are a little unwieldy but unfortunately there is nothing out there that would be a reasonable choice for a silent PC lover like myself.

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Don't know about all in ones but as I said my PC is silent and I have dual pumps. If you isolate your pumps from the case with some foam you won't get any vibration. Also need to make sure your pump doesn't whine. I've had to return a couple in the past due to unbearable whine.

When it comes to quiet a custom loop is king.

@sakichop: I do not doubt that and that is why I deliberately only talked about the complete sets (which are perfect for clumsy idiots like myself who would only cause a flooding with a custom set ).

I mean I can build my own system just fine these days but I'm still the kind of guy who lets go of a huge sigh of relief when the whole thing does not go up in a mayhem of lightning, thunder and smoke when pushing down the power button for the first time .

As I said, I'd love to switch to a all-in-one water cooling solution and had my eyes fixed on the Corsair H90 (with a single 140mm radiator) a while back since it was generally regarded as the most silent complete set but further research showed that it was still inferior in noise and only marginally better in temps/cooling than decent air coolers.

So now I have a Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 case with sound absorbing materials preinstalled and a Thermalright air cooler which is basically an inaudible combo except for a minor base humming sound (probably from the HDD more than the coolers actually).

If silence is a concern to anyone then I would definitely recommend either going with air or, like you did, with a custom set where you hand-pick the components and probably have the skills not just to install the kit but also make adjustments like the isolation of the pump as you mentioned.
But there does not seem to be a single real silent PC compatible complete set out there at the moment. Which is a real pity since it would be awesome to have more choice in that regard.

Air is good. AMD FX-3520E on stock air cooler (8 cores @ 3.2 GHz). 1080p on a GTX 670:

Divinity: Original Sin EE 1080p @ 60 FPS

Skyrim with High Res Pack 1080p @ 60 FPS


But water is much better for the coolness factor. And maybe it will get me to 5 Ghz?

Corsair H100i here we come.

Gorath said:

What m/b & CPU did you use?

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It's basically a pure office PC, running Excel and browser stuff, so I went for a minimum of energy usage. It's a G4500T and MSI H110M ECO . So it's a CPU with 35 TDP!
The integrated graphics card is a HD Graphics 530 which is not too shabby.
I have no idea how much TDP the Raijintek Ereboss can handle without fan but this CPU is kept cool under full load and 23 Degrees Ambient. CPU didn't became hotter than 31 Degrees Celsius.

Moriendor said:

Liiiiiiieeeeesss!

I can see all the fans… you need to hide them better .

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Well there are 3 case fans. But there is no graphics card (no graphics card fan), there is no CPU fan, and no PSU fan.

After much deliberation, I chose to get a Sapphire Radeon RX 470 Nitro+ with 4GB. I figured it's good enough for my moderate Full-HD gaming needs. Still a fantastic upgrade from my old 1GB Radeon HD6770.

I'm going to play around with Wattman soon for some righteous optimizing. Going to follow the Silent BIOS and undervolting route rather than extensive overclocking.

Arhu said:

After much deliberation, I chose to get a Sapphire Radeon RX 470 Nitro+ with 4GB. I figured it's good enough for my moderate Full-HD gaming needs. Still a fantastic upgrade from my old 1GB Radeon HD6770.

I'm going to play around with Wattman soon for some righteous optimizing. Going to follow the Silent BIOS and undervolting route rather than extensive overclocking.

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I went the same route, except with an MSI RX 470 4GB. I have yet to find a game that I can't run at full detail @ 2560 x 1080 (Ultrawide). Witcher runs almost 60 FPS average:

Currently the only game that can't run on RX 470 with everything maxed and still 60FPS or just a bit less is DX:MD.
On 1080p.

But don't sweat - some DX:MD options are ment for cards that don't even exist yet!

joxer said:

Currently the only game that can't run on RX 470 with everything maxed and still 60FPS or just a bit less is DX:MD.
On 1080p.

But don't sweat - some DX:MD options are ment for cards that don't even exist yet!

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Needs Vulkan!

Also, in Witcher 3 I dropped draw distance from Ultra to High. It netted over 10 FPS gain with no visual change. Some setting are there to experience a couple minutes of detail in a game that goes on for hours. Some just won't see value in that. AMD just updated their drivers too which upped minimum frame rate it appears.

Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 470 4GB Overclocking with Wattman

Silent BIOS defaults are 1206 MHz core clock and 1162 mV. Overclocked BIOS was 1260 MHz, if I recall correctly. I used the Unigine Heaven benchmark in Windowed mode for all my tests, with Tesselation set to medium and 4xAA. I kept GPU-Z running to monitor stats.


Global Settings

• I turned off Surface Format Optimization because Voodoo.
• I enabled VSync, because I can't stand tearing (disabled for benchmarking)
• I set Tesselation Mode to override and max tesselation level to 16x, as I heard anything more is overkill and unnecessary for AMD cards.
• I set Frame Rate Target Control to 63 (disabled for benchmarking), because a) my monitor can only do 60 FPS anyway (VSync) and b) setting it to 60 still produced tearing. Will help keep noise levels down and save power.
• For the rest I kept the defaults.
• Haven't tested the Power Efficiency setting yet. It's supposed to noticeably reduce power usage when watching Youtube videos etc.

Wattman Settings



I let the benchmark run for a while until the temperature didn't rise anymore then made a benchmark with default settings. Then I adjusted knobs until I was satisfied.
Temperature to manual; target 75, max 85 °C (default 90). Power Limit to 50% (default 0) so the GPU doesn't have to throttle down at all.
Fan Speed to manual, min 800, max 1600 (max noise level I was able to tolerate -- it's audible in my case, but acceptable).

I undervolted in 25 mV steps. The default at 1162 mV reached ~76°C, 1550 RPM, ~137 W average for 81.3 FPS. I could undervolt by 75 mV to 1087 mV without problems. At 1062 I got instability issues, like Programs crashing upon start etc. Incidentally, 0.75 V undervolting is what I read was pretty standard for the Radeon, so I'm happy with that. At 1087 mV the framerate didn't change, of course, but power consumption went down to ~102 W, temp went down to 72° (3° below target) and fan speed to 1300 RPM, which was fairly quiet.

I then tried overclocking a bit to at least get in range of the target temperature. I got to 1280 MHz without artifacts in the benchmark, but decided to drop down to 1260, which incidentally is the setting used in the OC BIOS of the card. The frame rate increased from 81.3 to 84.9, power consumption to 104 W average. Fan speed stays at ~1300 RPM (between 27% and 30%) and the temperature at ~72°C.

I didn't touch the memory clock as I heard it wasn't worth it.

So now I think I've got pretty sane settings. Smooth sailing all around.

edit: Someone got the core voltage down by 137 mV on the same card. Gotta try lowering it again just to make sure.

Tested the Power Efficiency setting. I think I'm going to keep it ON. It keeps the core clock way down (300) when watching Youtube videos, saving lots of energy. Games still run at max.

Wait, did you buy the new GPU to have fun WITHOUT playing games?! :shocked:

joxer said:

Wait, did you buy the new GPU to have fun WITHOUT playing games?! :shocked:

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With Youtube I meant watching Let's Play videos, of course. I mean, obviously.

Looks like CryEngine will have native Vulkan and multi-GPU support:

CryEngine will add DX12 multi-GPU and Vulkan in future versions

Here's hoping it puts pressure on others to do the same.

Caddy said:

Looks like CryEngine will have native Vulkan and multi-GPU support:

CryEngine will add DX12 multi-GPU and Vulkan in future versions

Here's hoping it puts pressure on others to do the same.

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No pressure necessary. It is more like Crytek is kind of lagging behind since Unreal engine, Frostbite and Unity already have implemented or announced Vulkan support.
I also hope that this will take off. It would be great if the DirectX monopoly can finally be cracked down after all these years.

Since Crytek had money issues (and lost a bunch of their engine developers to Foundry 42), it seems studios licencing the CryEngine are way ahead with DX12.

Vulkan is also still moving a little too slowly. Vulkan can't yet do multi GPU, and won't until the next version. I really hope it will take off on the desktop, but I'm slightly pessimistic. Unreal supports it at the moment, but is only targeting mobile games.

Okay, finally returning to finish my gaming rig off. It was a very nice summer
Are the results in where we can say rx480 over 1060 yet? Or vice vera? For someone who doesn't even have a 4k monitor, am I wasting my money and should I just get the rx470 or a rx480 4 gig because my local store has all 4 cards.

One more question if I may? Vulkan only refers to using more video cards including different makes of cards. My new motherboard has 3 slots for video cards. I haven't seen anything thats makes use of Vulkan except for Doom.